Illumination (45 page)

Even the reds had gone into an ominous hibernation. In the wake of the last sortie there had been a final small-scale revolt: Gustave Flourens had been broken out of the Mazas and once again an armed force had marched on the Hôtel de Ville. This time, however, the government response had been rapid and unequivocal. The infantry guarding the building had returned a desultory militia fire with deadly accuracy, killing several of their attackers and injuring scores more. This incident, French regulars shooting down French National Guard, had changed the game. The lanes of Montmartre went silent, and the avenues of Belleville were left to its children, but there could be little doubt that in the red clubs fresh plans were being prepared.

‘How’s Han doing?’ Clem asked.

Besson’s head fell. ‘She says little,’ he replied after a short pause. ‘She has been sleeping a good deal. The loss of the paintings was difficult, also, coming – coming when it did.’

‘How did it happen? The paintings, I mean?’

‘They said they were looking for a spy’s accomplice. They went up to your mother’s rooms. The next anyone knew burning canvases were landing in the place de l’Opéra. Troops were summoned to eject them, but it was too late.’ Besson looked away, over at a spiral of dress-hoops dangling from a nail. ‘I’ve heard that they paraded a portrait of the Prussian around for hours. Blanqui himself is said to have put a match to it.’

This wasn’t surprising. From one of the attic’s windows Clem had been able to watch the mob gutting the Danton, ripping out the bar whole and casting the Leopard’s fake trophies into the street. That shed of Hannah’s had been torn down too, the planks borne off to fuel honest proletarian fires. A campaign had plainly been waged to wipe every trace of the Leopard and his unwitting English accomplices from Paris.

‘It’ll be better when she can get out of this city.’ Clem held up his glass. ‘Are you sure you won’t join me?’

Besson declined; he would soon be leaving. For a short while neither of them spoke. Without cannon-fire, without street-corner orators, without horses or dogs or cats, Montmartre was deathly quiet. Eventually, an infant cried thinly somewhere below, followed by a splash as someone threw out a basin of water.

‘I can get you to the British Embassy,’ Besson said suddenly. He indicated his pea jacket – the sort currently being worn by the Parisian police. ‘I can procure a disguise like this one. Nobody will think anything of your wound. They will assume you are a casualty of the last battle. It is possible.’

Clem puffed out his cheeks as if astonished; he’d been expecting this. ‘Heavens, Émile, I don’t—’ He stopped. ‘I can’t ask you to take such a risk. I simply can’t. Moreover, this damned thing,’ he gestured contemptuously at his foot, ‘is rather worse than it appears.’ He gave a second’s thought to broken ankles and how bad they could be. ‘The, ah, the bone pierced the skin, don’t y’know. The doctor who came up here to see me said I really shouldn’t move it for a month.’

The
aérostier
smiled. He glanced at the feminine items piled around them; he could see the truth clearly enough. ‘Very well,’ he said, ‘but you should really keep to yourself as much as possible. You are known to the ultras, Clement, and they will not forget. The trials of Paris have not ended with the siege. Something else is coming. You must remain alert.’

This was parting advice. ‘You’re really going, then? Leaving Paris? It seems impossible, old man, that you could exist anywhere else.’

‘I must,’ Besson said, ‘for the time being. I was seen by the reds helping the Leopard of Montmartre escape apprehension. I am French, also, a Parisian; this makes me a genuine traitor. I will be at the very top of Raoul Rigault’s list.’ He spoke matter-of-factly, without bitterness. ‘The last post balloon has flown. The workshops have been closed. There is nothing to hold me here.’

Clem opened his mouth to deliver the stunning argument that would induce Besson to stay. Nothing came. He frowned, swirled the liquor around in his glass and took another gulp.

The
aérostier
got up from his chair. ‘I must be off. I should be back at the Champs Elysées before dark.’

‘Tell them that I’ll return to London after the elections,’ Clem said. ‘Before the end of February, at any rate. Or March, at the latest.’ He hesitated. ‘Tell them I’ll write.’

A last look passed between the two men. Clem felt an urge to embrace this fellow, this dear friend who’d done so much for his family; rising would be a challenge, though, and might somewhat undermine his claims to immobility. In this instant of indecision the chance was lost. Besson put a hand on his shoulder, uncommon warmth in his eyes; and then he ducked through the low attic doorway.

At the click of the latch Laure’s face appeared at the nearest window, tobacco smoke trailing from her nostrils. She’d slipped out when Besson had announced himself, cursing the concierge who’d directed him to them, and had spent the last quarter of an hour perched on the roof. Since that night she’d refused to see anyone save her patient. There had been numerous knocks and shouts up from the street – the
vivandières
of the 197th, Raoul Rigault, one of those painters who used to hang around with Han – and she’d ignored them all. Clem’s French wasn’t good enough for him to be able to question her very closely about this reclusive behaviour, but it was pretty obvious that she didn’t want much more to do with the reds of Montmartre.

The conversation with Besson had given Clem an uneasy feeling – a faint sense of being left behind. Sight of Laure relieved this at once. He pulled open the casement; she hitched up her skirts and climbed in, a cigarette poking from her red lips. Her gown was an iridescent, silky green, well cut and certainly expensive, lifted from God knows where. The cocotte had taken to sloping out while Clem was asleep, returning each dawn with provisions and an armful of swag. A National Guard greatcoat was draped across her shoulders; the copper hair, longer now, was coiled in a loose bun. She sat down heavily in the chair Besson had just vacated, swearing under her breath, rubbing her frozen hands together and then holding them to the grate of their pot-bellied stove. After a few seconds, she noticed that he was staring at her. She leaned over to the chaise longue and gave him a sharp dig in the ribs.

It was almost like an act of penance. Laure had dragged Clem single-handed from beneath the boots of those set on kicking him to death for the crime of being his mother’s son. He’d been insensible, covered in blood, but somehow she’d got him to this garret – owned, Clem later learned, by a friend of a friend long since fled from the city. The following day he’d come round to discover her bandaging his broken foot, looking so beautiful, so pale and fine, that tears had sprung to his eyes.

‘Mademoiselle Laure,’ he’d mumbled. ‘Where the devil have you been?’

She’d turned towards him with distinct irritation, releasing a barrage of words that he’d struggled to understand – although he gathered that he and his family had disappointed her in some heinous way, landing her in a terrible, irresolvable dilemma. Even now, two weeks later, having tended to him devotedly, she still shot him the odd glance of annoyance.

‘
Elles vont,
’ Clem told her. ‘
Ma mère et ma soeur.
’

Laure thought about this for a moment, then shrugged and picked up an empty glass from the floor. Peering around for the bottle, she reached across to slide a hand inside his shirt; he jumped at the touch of her icy fingertips.

VI

Hannah looked out at Saint-Denis as it crawled past the window of their carriage. Heavily bombarded in the siege’s final weeks, the town was a wreck adrift in a sea of mud. Many of the houses lacked roofs; the cathedral had a yawning hole in its façade in place of a rose window. She caught a glimpse of the statue in the main square, its head sheared clean off. There were harsh voices nearby. Down beside the tracks, a detachment of Prussian infantry was menacing some French railway workers, jabbing at them with their rifle-butts.

‘I could tell from the accent,’ Mr Inglis was saying. ‘Alsatian my eye! It was obvious, quite frankly. That the reds managed to overlook it is a clear indication of how credulous and ignorant they are.’

Elizabeth glowered at him. ‘What in heaven do you mean, Mont, you impossible beast? The man spoke French like a native. No one saw through him. Mr Blount at the embassy told me that every officer in the Prussian army has been required to learn French since the early sixties. And the captain was plainly an extraordinary officer. His mastery of that tongue, and our own as well, is really no marvel.’

For a fortnight or so Elizabeth and Mr Inglis had steered their conversation clear of Captain Brenner, to spare Hannah’s feelings. In time, though, the boredom of confinement to the British Embassy and the sheer fascination of the subject had rendered it irresistible. One day it had been broached, rather cautiously; now they talked of little else. They’d combed over every detail of Brenner’s great trick, from the scar and damaged hand – wounds most probably inflicted during the Prussian campaign against Austria, it was concluded – to the sources of his rhetoric. Her mother always made much of the perfection of the illusion, whilst the newspaperman insisted that he’d been thoroughly sceptical from the start.

The sixteen days cooped up in the embassy waiting for news had weighed heavily on Elizabeth and Mr Inglis, but Hannah had barely noticed their passing. She’d laid out a bed for herself in the corner of a clerks’ office and stayed there. It had felt as if she was under the influence of a powerful narcotic. She’d experience disorientating, contradictory emotions; and then, for long periods, nothing at all. France’s surrender, once an inconceivable tragedy, meant little. The destruction of her work, even, had been merely another blow landed on someone completely stupefied. Jean-Jacques Allix was written into the best of it, a glaring falsehood undermining those earnest attempts at truth; that the canvases had been burned was almost a relief.

The train rounded a corner and slowed to a long, squealing halt. Outside now was a redoubt, the Prussian flag floating above its walls. Mr Inglis got to his feet. The newspaperman had made it safely to his apartment that night, having fled when the mob charged. So certain did he become, however, that the reds had taken note of him – that he would be dragged from his study and decapitated on the pavement – that he’d joined them at the embassy anyway. He’d written to the editor of the
Sentinel
the same hour that the armistice was declared, offering his resignation from the Paris desk and announcing that he would be returning to London on the first available form of conveyance.

‘I’ll see what the delay is,’ he said, opening the compartment door. ‘Honestly, this confounded country.’

Alone with her daughter, Elizabeth began to talk of her book. She’d soon dismissed suggestions that it would have to be abandoned, or even that there would have to be an alteration of subject.

‘We are not
French
,’ she’d said, ‘as the residents of Paris never tired of reminding us. We owe them no loyalty – no consideration of what might offend. Interest in this character, this provocateur of ours, will be intense.’

‘You took up his cause, though,’ Hannah had pointed out. ‘You are hardly a dispassionate voice. Those articles of yours—’

‘—were anonymous, my girl.
Anonymous
. Only rumour connects me to them. And I am as dispassionate, Hannah, as the day is long. It is an ideal subject for me. The mystery of it, with so much left unresolved; a man who put us both at such awful risk, who attempted to kill Clement in that balloon to protect his secret, only to sacrifice himself at the final moment so that we might escape. The sheer
nobility
implied by this, despite everything. It is intriguing, you must admit.’

There was one significant change to Elizabeth’s literary plans: a marked increase in her daughter’s proposed contribution. She envisaged sections narrated by one who’d been in the thick of it – at the Leopard’s side. As usual, she’d tried to initiate a bargaining process: a slice of the proceeds, naturally, with the chance of a co-author’s credit on the front page if Hannah could bring herself to attempt a likeness from memory – and perhaps, again if she were amenable, a couple of key scenes from the Leopard’s astonishing career.

Hannah remained noncommittal. It still seemed ridiculous that she was doing this; it still felt as if she was giving in. But she’d seen Rigault that night, marshalling his murderous mob. No mercy would be shown to her. The despair that had gripped her in the Grand Hotel had lifted: she no longer had any wish to die. She’d let her mother run on for now. A proper discussion of this book could wait until they were in London.

And London, of course, was Elizabeth’s other great topic. She’d shown an unheard-of willingness to admit mistakes – what she termed ‘the well-intentioned errors of the past’ – and wanted to describe how very different everything would be when they were back.

‘You are older, Hannah; you have lived a little. Your gifts have developed. You can meet the metropolis on a more equal footing. Taking you to Gabriel as I did that night was utterly wrong. I can see that now, all too clearly. He is far too fragile for one of your robust tastes. But his wider circle really does contain some fascinating people. There’s one gentleman I think you’d particularly like, an American painter – quite the wit, and very familiar with these French ideas of yours. I believe he is even applying them to his own renditions of the Thames.’

Hannah shifted in her seat. ‘Elizabeth …’

‘London is changing, my girl. Gabriel’s friends talk constantly of setting up their own place – to exhibit foreigners and women and all sorts. If you are astute – if you take the chances offered, who knows what—’

Elizabeth stopped talking; she opened her notebook and began to write. Émile Besson had appeared in the doorway of the compartment. He’d been at the end of the carriage, standing out in the open air, watching Paris sink into the Seine valley. The unmasking of Jean-Jacques Allix had failed to prompt a reassessment of the
aérostier
. Elizabeth didn’t trust him; she didn’t like him; she suspected him of conservative leanings and a cramped imagination. As he was a friend of Clem’s she’d felt obliged to offer him a few days’ accommodation in London, but clearly meant to chase him off as soon as she could.